Be Better As Soon As I'm Able
by Signy1
Summary: Music is usually deeply interwoven with memory. Quill's music collection is very much a part of him, very evocative of his past and his Terran family. It turns out that he's not the only one for whom those tunes bring back a lot of memories.


It had been an accident. Really. It had.

Oh, Quill wasn't above a bit of friendly teasing here or there. Or even slightly less than friendly teasing, if it came to that. None of them were. Rocket was no exception to that rule, and Quill had no qualms about tweaking his ego every once in a while, on the principle that 'if you can dish it out, you can take it.' All it took was an offhanded 'raccoon' to set him off like the Fourth of July, and, frankly, a lot of the time it was pretty damned funny.

This time, though… it had genuinely been an accident. Quill was still getting the hang of his new music recorder; a heretofore undiscovered playlist of Beatles tunes had been a pleasant surprise. He'd already belted out 'Yellow Submarine,' masterfully air-guitared 'Get Back,' and had grooved his way through 'Help.' That one had startled Groot, who had come running to offer whatever assistance six inches of twig might be able to provide, and stayed to enjoy the music after they'd straightened out the difference between a distress call and musical genius.

And they were halfway through 'Rocky Raccoon,' (just about the 'Rocky had come/ Equipped with a gun' line, which only amped up the irony factor by a few billion degrees,) when Quill happened to look up and notice Rocket standing in the doorway watching them. He cut the music immediately, which skidded them all immediately into uncomfortable silence territory.

 _Aw, crap,_ Quill thought. _He's going to flip out, and I'll be checking my shoes for booby traps for a week._ "Hey, um, Rocky—I mean Rocket! Rock-ET. I mean, um. What's up?"

Rocket just looked at him expressionlessly. "Just wanted to let you know. Drax got his head stuck in the exhaust vent again. Gamora's working on it, but we can't run the air purifiers until we've gotten him out and scrubbed the filters. It's going to get pretty stale in here, so don't get all shocked when you find yourself breathing Destroyer dandruff."

"Oh. Okay. Thanks," said Quill, who had no idea how to go about bringing up the elephant in the room. Or the raccoon, either.

"I am Groot?"

"No, I don't know for sure that he does, but he might. You don't got to have hair to have dandruff."

"I am Groot?"

"Nah, you definitely don't have any, don't worry about it. You got bark, not skin."

"I am Groot."

"Fine, whatever. _Maybe_ you got pollen. Either way, you're not the idiot who's fu—fouling up our whole air system, so it's a moot point."

"I am Groot!"

"I _know_ you know the word 'fucking.' Doesn't mean _you_ should go around using it. I'm a bad example, okay? Don't do like me."

Quill, who still couldn't figure out the Groot language to save his life, got to his feet, because it wasn't like he was adding anything to the conversation. "Well, I should go help Gamora."

"Yeah. You do that," said Rocket. "Groot, why don't you go give them a hand, too, okay? You can do the pointing and laughing."

"Isn't that usually your part?" They seemed to be going with the 'pretend it didn't happen' plan. That was fine by him, Quill thought. Especially if it meant that his shoes were safe.

"I'm willing to let someone else do the honors every once in a while," said Rocket, sounding almost like himself. "Gotta let the kid have _some_ fun, even if we are going to have a few discussions about that potty mouth of his one of these days."

"I am Groot!"

"Case in frigging point. Go take care of Drax's head, and you don't need to be too careful. Not like he uses the damn thing as anything but a blunt object anyway."

With that, he turned away, swaggered down the corridor in the opposite direction from where Gamora really was trying to get Drax's head out of a very tight vent, swaggered faster and faster until it was something a lot closer to a scamper, and not so terribly far from running outright.

When he got to his own quarters and had the doors safely locked—shit, the amount of time and effort he'd put into getting the hell out of locked rooms, who'd ever have thought that he'd be locking himself _in_ something. Crazy damned galaxy—he stopped, and stood very still in the middle of the room, trying to catch his breath and regain his composure and stop the memories, all at the same time, and not having a whole lot of luck with any of them.

It had been the song that had done it. Not even the bit with words, about the guy with the name that sounded so much like his coupled with the animal Quill insisted he resembled. No, it had been the bit where the singer hummed a wordless, bouncy melody; the tune sparked a lot of the sort of memories he preferred to keep locked away. Which, to be fair, was most of them.

In at least seventeen star systems it's an accepted fact that the Beatles wrote some of the catchiest tunes in known space. Some of their songs have, through some mysterious alchemy, spread themselves far and wide, even in systems that have never otherwise heard of humans. Not everything translated all that well, of course, and there's no accounting for tastes, but a lot of it had reached a wider and more varied audience than the musicians themselves could have dreamed of. 'I Want To Hold Your Tentacle' was top of the charts in the Xhalamir system for eleven straight weeks. Needless to say, no royalties ever made it to Terra, but perhaps that was beside the point.

And apparently 'Rocky Raccoon' had made it offworld, too. Rocket hadn't known it, but he had heard that song before. Not the lyrics; just the melody. Someone he'd known, long ago, liked to hum it as he worked. Someone he'd… well, not _trusted_ , and certainly nothing like a friend, he'd never done anything to earn that, but a person who'd never actively hurt him, and with the kind of bastards that, in his experience, infested most of the galaxy, that was something of a rarity.

He undid one shoulder strap of his coverall, and craned his neck to examine the knobbly scar tissue and extruding cybernetic components that studded his back and torso; they were not something he usually looked at, and were pretty much never something he wanted to think about. But they were always there, oh, yes, they were, and the blood-and-disinfectant smell of the lab was never all that far from his nose, as though it had been implanted just as permanently, just as painfully, just as sadistically.

And that stupid song, the meaningless musical syllables, kept playing in his mind, over and goddamned over, but not in McCartney's voice and slightly out of tune.

"It was all just a joke," he muttered to himself, running a finger across the metal bolts just below his collarbone. "Just another joke on the twisted little freak. Another big laugh on you, 89P13, and you were just too frigging dumb to see it." He sat right down on the floor and stayed there for a while, head bowed and eyes fixed sightlessly on his hands as the uncirculating air got staler. Sometimes there just wasn't anything to say.

*.*.*.*.*.*

The janitor was on the older side, and he took his job seriously. Mopping a floor didn't mean 'clean,' it meant ' _spotless_.' Tables were not meant to be merely 'neat' when 'sterile' was a possibility. Dirt was a bad word; if you were going to do a job at all, he felt, you might as well do it right, and that meant no slacking and no shortcuts. That said, there was no reason life had to be grim, and he was the closest thing to sunshine the lab ever saw. Ironic, given that he worked at night.

"Hey there, little guy. It's me again," he said, snapping on the light switch and pulling the floor cleaning unit from his cart. The baby raccoon in the cage lifted his head a fraction and sniffed curiously. It was the most he was capable of just then; all four limbs were splinted and immobilized in a cruciform position that was completely unnatural for a quadruped. The janitor shook his head, and winced sympathetically. Another surgery, he supposed. Looked like a big one, too. Poor little beast. "Wow, fella, you look like you've had a busy day. And I'm no kind of doctor, but my mom always said that sleep is the best thing for you when you're not feeling so hot. You just lay back down and let Tarven make your house nice and clean for you."

Needless to say, the raccoon didn't see it that way, and it chittered. Tarven had some vague notion that the long term plans for the creature involved artificial vocal cords at some point; he wondered idly what it would have to say as he dumped the contents of a trash can into the sorter for eventual recycling. "Not sleepy, eh, little guy? Have it your way. If watching me scrub the sinks makes you happy, go for it."

He hummed as he worked; he usually did. That evening, he glanced at the little raccoon lying awkwardly on its back, trying to watch him, and smiled sadly. This was probably the worst part of this job, which was otherwise pretty good. The pay was decent, his bosses were fairly reasonable, and he liked the night hours, but the endless array of animals from God-only-knows-where being subjected to God-only-knows-what gave him the creeps, especially the ones who looked at him like they were asking him to help them. And that wasn't even getting into the preserved ones in the specimen room, whose staring, dead eyes looked at him as though asking why he hadn't.

He cleared his throat roughly, shoving the thoughts away. It wasn't his fault, not any of it, and maybe if he kept telling himself that, he'd start believing it after a while. "Boy, I must be getting old," he told the creature. "Standing here woolgathering. You're the one who needs your sleep, and I'm the one napping. Don't tell the big shots, all right?"

The creature cocked his head and squeaked. Probably just a coincidence that it sounded like a response, and the fact that the little raccoon was maintaining eye contact had to be because he was restrained in a position where he almost had to. Yep. Coincidence.

"I'll take that as a yes," he said, hefting the floor cleaner back onto his cart with a grunt, and shoved the whole contraption out the door a bit too quickly. "See you later, little guy."

There were three fingerprints on the stainless steel supplies cabinet; he'd neglected to polish them away. He'd never done that before. Not once.

*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: Obviously, this takes place well before Infinity War. The comics creators were pretty open about the fact that they borrowed Rocket's name from the Beatles song- and God only knows how they got away with that- although I've occasionally wondered if they didn't have 'Rocket J. Squirrel' from the Bullwinkle cartoons in mind, as well. Anyhow, it seemed to be to be stretching coincidence to the breaking point to assume that a raccoon came up with the name 'Rocky' (which is what he was called in his first comics appearances,) without the Beatles song entering into it *somewhere,* so here goes nothing.

I've stuck with the movies' practice of presenting the Groot dialogue without glosses or translations, letting the reader figure it out from context and Rocket's replies. I hope this isn't too confusing; he's, paradoxically enough, NOT an easy character to write for.


End file.
